Who We Are
We are Turning Tides Collective. We believe that we can create a world where everyone is treated with dignity and humanity. We believe that one step toward that world is creating organizations that represent our communities and are equitable and just in how they treat their staff and do their work.
To ask “How” is to open the door to possibility.
To do this work, we inhabit “How.” To ask “How” is to open the door to possibility. It sparks partnership. It suspends judgment and invites involved parties to consider what can be done to move forward together. It is the first step toward changing course and forging a new path. In “How” is where our vision lies.
We would love to meet you in the “How” and discover the possibilities for your organization or project. Please join us and let us work together to turn the tides and chart a new course that makes your organization stronger.
Lisa Ramadhar, co-owner
I am passionate about contributing my unique gifts to creating a world that honors every person's dignity and humanity.
Lisa is a changemaker and strategist with years of experience in government, public health, social policy, and movement-building. She brings extensive experience in research and evaluation and approaches her work analytically. Applying inquiry and design principles, Lisa helps organizations examine their current state, set clear goals and create plans to achieve strategic goals. And she does all of this with relationships and people most impacted at the center.
Lisa comes to her work with extensive research, program development, and organization and culture change experience. Recently, she led a strategic initiative to transform a local government agency into an anti-racist organization. Her team examined how racism and systems of oppression operate through the agency’s policies, practices, and norms to create inequitable outcomes for staff and built a movement to advance equity initiatives throughout the agency. Lisa supported that project as evaluator and project director. Currently, Lisa is driving change in the nonprofit sector. She applies her research skills to generate data that demonstrate the inequities in the sector, and offer recommendations to address those inequities. This work continues to build on her culture change work by demonstrating the points of inequity in the sector and providing strategic solutions.
As an immigrant of color growing up in a poor single-parent household in New York City, culture change work is deeply personal for Lisa. She often interacted with systems that left her and loved ones feeling dehumanized and unsupported. Inspired by her lived experience, Lisa’s research and social change work is rooted in human rights and seeks to ensure that all people are treated with dignity and humanity in every interaction at the structural, institutional, systems, and individual levels.
In building Turning Tides Collective, Lisa seeks to expand her culture change work one client organization at a time. In working with clients, she brings her experience and analysis to creating the types of organizations that treat people internally and externally with dignity and humanity. In doing so, she is actively creating a better world.
Lisa is a mom of two little people and she enjoys that role very much. She loves food, especially the Guyanese food she was raised on, and has recently developed a penchant for baking.
Mateo Belen, co-owner
Valuing individual perspective and needs as part of the collective experience is fundamental to my work.
Mateo's approach to healing work is informed by his training in trauma informed systems.He received his Masters in Social Work from Silberman School of Social Work with a focus on creating trauma informed systems shifts in organizations working with TGNCNB individuals of color. This training, along with his own experience, provided them with insight on the role of organizations in creating and perpetuating trauma, and the capacity of organizations to be healing spaces where community is a practice.
Raised and held by compassionate elders, Mateo is continually guided to understand the power and practice of a committed, deliberate, interdependent community. He brings a variety of healing tools cultivated through their own experience in community, non-profits, city government, and navigating trauma.
Fundamental to his work is valuing individual perspective and needs as part of the collective experience. Therefore, he emphasizes individual work as part of community and organizational healing. He also recognizes the unique needs of each community and organization they work with. Accordingly, he tailors his practice to each situation to ensure that needs are understood and met.